Sometimes the best firewall is a physical one, made of wooden blocks and pure imagination.
Next week, my youngest turns one. My oldest is eight. As a father who spends over eight hours a day staring at screens for work, I've made a choice that surprises many people: I deliberately keep my children away from tablets, smartphones, and the digital noise that dominates modern childhood.
This isn't technophobia. This is informed caution.
The Paradox of the Digital Worker
I live in code. I architect systems. I debug, deploy, and iterate. Yet when I need to truly retain information, in a meeting, during a critical discussion, I reach for something analog: a real notebook and a pen.
There's something about the physical act of writing that creates a different kind of engagement. My hand moves, my brain processes in real time, acting as a throughput for information rather than a passive receiver. The connection between listening, thinking, and writing forces focus in a way that typing on a keyboard never quite achieves. I retain more. I understand deeper.
If I, someone who builds digital systems for a living, need to step away from screens to think clearly, what does that tell us about developing minds?
The Nintendo Switch Principle
My eight-year-old doesn't own a laptop or smartphone. He has a Nintendo Switch, and I love it for one specific reason: it's just a gaming device. No Spotify. No Google. No real internet access. No infinite scroll of content designed by engagement engineers to hijack attention.
When it's meal time, he turns it off. When he's ready to play again, he turns it on and resumes exactly where he left off. No lost progress. No notifications pulling him back in. No algorithms learning his preferences to serve him "just one more" video.
I still remember my mother's frustration when I was a kid, unable to understand that some games couldn't be paused. He's too young for online multiplayer, but the principle stands: we've designed a boundary around gaming that keeps it contained, intentional, and controllable.
And the beautiful thing? He handles time away from screens marvelously. He plays with his toys, makes up elaborate stories, builds worlds from his imagination. His creativity isn't depleted; it thrives.
What We're Really Stealing
I've seen children his age who own smartphones, who play Roblox (which I genuinely believe is a pedophile's playground), who lack any sense of imagination. It breaks my heart because I know what's been stolen from them, not maliciously, but carelessly.
Their parents didn't set out to harm them. They wanted to buy themselves some peace, some "quality time" without the constant demands of engaged parenting. And I get it. Parenting is exhausting. But the trade-off is devastating.
Yes, those kids are "tech savvy." They can navigate apps better than my son can navigate a computer login screen. He still depends on us to open his school assignments. He struggles with digital tasks that his peers breeze through.
But I'm not in a hurry.
He'll have decades to become fluent in digital interfaces. He'll learn when he's developmentally ready, when he can communicate assertively, when he actually needs a phone for safety or coordination. And even then, it won't be a smartphone, it'll be a basic device with Snake or Brick Breaker, something that serves a purpose without becoming a portal to infinite distraction.
The Infra Engineer Who Won't Smart-Home
There's an old saying in tech: true infrastructure engineers don't have smart homes. They've seen behind the curtain. They know the vulnerabilities, the data collection, the attack surfaces. They understand that the convenience isn't free, it's financed by surveillance, by vendor lock-in, by security risks that most consumers never consider.
I apply the same logic to childhood screen exposure. I know enough to know that the risks outweigh the benefits. The price we pay for that "freemium" childhood is far higher than most parents realize: depleted attention spans, reduced frustration tolerance, algorithmic manipulation, privacy invasion, and the slow erosion of the skills that make us human.
Building Humans, Not Users
I'm not protecting my children from technology. I'm protecting their humanity.
I'm giving them the gift of boredom, which is the birthplace of creativity. I'm teaching them frustration tolerance by not letting them skip past every moment of difficulty with a dopamine hit. I'm preserving their ability to engage with the physical world, to "touch grass," to develop the deep focus that will become increasingly rare as AI handles more of our cognitive load.
These aren't just soft skills. These are survival skills for an uncertain future.
While their peers may grow up dependent on ChatGPT to decide what to eat for breakfast, my children will have something more valuable: the ability to think critically, to create from nothing, to adapt to changing circumstances, and to maintain their agency in a world designed to extract it.
When the time comes for them to engage with technology, and it will come, they'll do so from a position of strength. They'll have the cognitive tools to use technology rather than be used by it. They'll have imaginations that weren't outsourced to algorithm-driven content. They'll have experienced enough of reality to know when the digital world is failing them.
The Long Game
This approach isn't easy. My son struggles with online school assignments while his classmates don't. We have to be more present, more engaged, less able to use screens as a babysitter. We get judged by other parents who think we're overprotective or unrealistic.
But next week, when my youngest turns one and we celebrate another year of protecting their childhood, I'll know we made the right choice.
Because in a world where everyone is optimizing for convenience, we're optimizing for humanity.
And that's a bet I'm willing to make.
In a world of infinite digital input, the most radical act of rebellion is to remain beautifully, inefficiently analog.
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